


a million dead-end streets

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 00:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11497869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Four ways Peter and Yondu's story might have gone, in other universes.





	a million dead-end streets

**Author's Note:**

> Title from David Bowie's "Changes".

1.

Somewhere there's a universe where Yondu Udonta, flattening down the pangs of conscience, delivers Peter Quill to Ego just like he was hired to do.

 _This is the last one,_ he tells himself, as he stands back and watches the angry, grieving child -- who had spent two weeks on the _Eclector_ hiding from the crew, spitting furious threats at Yondu in Terran, and crying softly in the room where they kept him locked up -- straightens from his defensive curl as he grasps what Ego is telling him in his own language. Which, based on the way the boy's face is now shining up at the old bastard, must be something along the lines of _I'm your daddy, boy._

And Yondu squashes the part of him that suspects (no, _knows_ ) what's going to happen to that boy, tells himself the payout is worth it, tells himself it's a cruel, ugly universe and these kids are getting a little bit of happiness in the middle of all that, so why's he moanin' about it? 

He tells himself he ain't taking another call from Ego. He's taking his boys clear to the other side of the galaxy from Terra and if Ego tries to give him another address, he's not picking it up.

But Ego doesn't call. Maybe that really was the last one.

It's about a month later when news starts coming in of worlds going dark on the galactic communications grid. Just ... vanished. No signals coming out. Ships that go there to find out what happened don't come back.

Yondu doesn't find out about it for awhile, because he's got problems of his own. Another of the little white lies he's been telling himself is that Stakar would never find out (and there's nothing to find out anyway, kids are happy with their daddy, never mind he's never seen a single one of those kids running around on that Celestial jerkwad's planet) -- but Stakar _did_ find out, and Stakar hit the ceiling in a way Yondu's never seen before, not the kind of anger that flares up and gets someone shot, but a cold hard anger that's like a radiation burn, leaving no outward mark but going all the way to the bone.

And now Yondu is an exile, with a crew made up of about one-third his most loyal people, the ones willing to follow him into exile, and the other two-thirds of dregs and scum from every seedy spaceport between here and Knowhere. So he's dealing with that, and trying to build up a reputation again from scratch, telling himself all the while that it don't matter, Stakar's a jackass and Yondu was just doing what Stakar _taught_ him, damn it, going where the money is.

(And sometimes he wonders what happened to that last kid. Smart, scrappy little Quill. That kid was good Ravager material -- but a pirate ship ain't no place for a kid.)

(Quill's all right, he tells himself; he's with his daddy and his brothers and sisters. He's a damn sight better off than he was back on that nothing of a planet where Yondu picked him up in a cornfield.)

(That nothing of a planet no longer exists, as such, but Yondu doesn't know that.)

And it's about four years later when he sees Quill again for the next and last time. By that time, Yondu and his crew are in one of the scattered corners of the galaxy that hasn't fallen to what everyone's just calling The Scourge. This quadrant is a mess of refugees from a hundred worlds. Somebody with a sunnier view of human nature than Yondu might think people would set aside their differences when everyone's in danger, but of course they don't, which is why he's stuck in a solar system that's got about twelve different factions (Nova Empire, Kree, Shi'ar, who the hell cares who else), all fighting to divide it up. There's good profit to be made gun-running, so that's what Yondu and his crew are doing, along with another Ravager clan run by a captain called Sylva.

Stakar's edict doesn't much matter anymore. Stakar's been dead for years and most of the clans are gone too. The ones that are left don't follow the Code anymore. They're just pirates. Which is all they ever really were, Yondu thinks. All the rest was just some bullshit Stakar made up to salve whatever ragged fringes of a conscience he had left. Profit's what counts. Profit's the only thing that counts.

And into this system, comes a ship shaped like an egg.

Say what you will about Yondu Udonta -- he's a mercenary and a general all-around backstabbing bastard, an asshole out for a fast unit, and most of what was honorable in him, whether he'd admit to it or not, died along with Stakar and a bunch of kids. But he and his crew go down fighting. Not that they ever had a chance; not that there are many places left to run even if they tried. But they fight to the end.

Ego could have just wiped out every last one of them with a wave of his hand, but he has Yondu dragged to him in chains, the arrow broken, his crew dead. Yondu doesn't recognize the boy sitting beside Ego at first. He's a few years older than when Yondu last saw him, grown now into a gangly teenager. And he's perfectly blank-faced. All the anger, all the animation, all that bright intelligence and fury and promise is gone, wiped away, like he's been cored out from the inside. His eyes are filled with light to the brims.

"I just wanted to thank you for your service, Yondu," Ego says politely. "I couldn't have done it without you."

"Go to hell," Yondu snarls.

"You first," and Ego makes a gesture to the boy. The last thing Yondu sees is those blank, light-filled eyes turning his way.

* * *

2.

Somewhere there's a universe where Yondu shows up to pick up Peter while Meredith Quill is still alive, because Ego's timing was a little bit tight on that one.

If he'd gotten a clear shot at the boy -- if he'd managed to catch him alone and just scooped him up -- it would've been easy. But he's already halfway decided he might not go ahead and deliver this one, and ... okay, he's got a protocol for getting kids away from their overprotective guardians, because he and his crew already had to do it a couple of times -- bribing, cajoling, threatening. ( _Buying_ , a whisper in the back of his mind tells him.) And he could've done that here. But it's gonna be a huge hassle because Terrans aren't used to offworlders, and he can't pass for a Terran even on a dark night. 

And this turns out to be the time he says, fuck it. He's not gonna do it. Not worth the trouble. He's been watching for two days, trying to find an opportunity, but the kid's glued to his mom's side all cycle long. And he can tell there's something a little bit sickly about the mom, but the kid seems happy and the mom seems happy, and ... fuck it. Ego can go jump into a black hole.

It doesn't score him any points in Stakar's eyes, in the end. They're still exiled, and he ends up kicking around the galaxy with a gang that grows ever meaner and less scrupulous. You gotta be a certain kind of person to ride herd on scum like this, and after Kraglin and a couple of the other most loyal members of his crew die in a botched heist on a vault asteroid in one of the outer Nova systems (which might've gone differently, and in a different universe maybe _did_ go differently, if any of them had been small enough to crawl through the vents and disable the asteroid's defensive guns), it gets harder and harder to hear the part of himself that made him give up those lucrative contracts from Ego, once upon a time. Sometimes he thinks about getting back in touch with Ego, seeing if that kind of work is still available, but there's still just enough left of the man he once was (the man he could have been) to make him back down.

He lives a fairly long life for a pirate, all things considered, mostly by being the meanest motherfucker in his chosen part of the galaxy. Eventually he's murdered by a few of his men in something that is more a coup than a mutiny; by now there's nobody in his crew he trusts, for good reason. But Yondu hasn't trusted anybody, let alone liked anybody, including himself, for a very long time.

His body is thrown into the incinerator, unmourned, and a few hours later the crew rides again under a new captain.

A year or two after that, Ronan destroys Xandar and Thanos's reign of terror begins. Stakar ends up organizing the 99 Ravager clans into a kind of ragtag resistance. By that point, though, Thanos's power is so consolidated that they never have a chance.

(And somewhere far across the galaxy, Peter Quill's ashes are long since cold and scattered. Three years after Yondu's attempt, a different, much less scrupulous hireling of Ego's showed up on Earth to retrieve the boy, who by that point was orphaned and living with his grandparents in Missouri. 

But an eleven-year-old is a lot more of a handful than a grieving eight-year-old, especially when he's a rural kid whose elderly guardian has started taking him hunting with the family's shotgun. And Yondu, as it turned out, who had always had a natural talent for getting along with kids, was unusually good at child retrieval, compared to the sort of bottom-feeders Ego is hiring these days. Neither Peter nor his grandparents survive the encounter.)

* * *

3.

 

Somewhere there's a universe where Yondu just says "fuck it", he can just let Ego deal with the both of them, and scoops up Meredith Quill (dying, but still mobile and pretty healthy-looking) along with her son.

Yondu hasn't quite managed to acknowledge that he's already kinda, sorta made the decision not to turn this one over to Ego. He's still trying to convince himself that he's in it for the money.

But he can't.

Not another child. Not _this_ child and his fierce, brave mother, both of them facing the galaxy with wide-eyed wonder, both of them obviously completely and utterly devoted to each other.

It breaks Yondu, just a little, spending too much time around Meredith's constant daily reminders that there are parents out there in the galaxy who love their children that much.

Ego ain't one of them.

In the end, he takes Meredith into his quarters late in a ship cycle and tells her the truth. About Ego. About all the many other mothers and children on other worlds, and what Yondu helped Ego do. 

He knows she either won't believe him -- woman's pretty far gone for that worthless bastard -- or she'll hate him. When her temper flares up in anger, he's glad. All he wants to do is stop her from trying to take the kid to Ego on her own. If she's got just enough doubt to get this pissed at him, then maybe it'll save her life.

Meredith refuses to spend another day on the ship. Good for her. She demands to be taken home, not for the first time. He doesn't. Instead he drops them off in a port city on Xandar, halfway around the planet from the capital. Ego might still be able to find them on Terra, but not here, except by pure chance; it's a huge damn galaxy and he won't have the first idea where to look.

"I hate you!" Meredith screams after him, while Peter holds her hand; Yondu can almost feel the kid's wide, confused eyes watching him stalk back to his M-ship. Kid had been coming to enjoy being on a pirate ship; he'd been pestering Yondu to teach him how to fly. Wasn't hardly afraid of Yondu at all. No accounting for taste.

He wonders how long it'll take her to discover the credit account he left her on Xandar to get something done about that cancer problem of hers.

Anyway. He managed to save one of them. Maybe that'll count for something with Stakar.

It doesn't.

But three years later, part of his crew damn near dies in a botched raid -- would've died, if an M-ship hadn't dropped outta nowhere, taken out the asteroid's defenses, and saved their asses.

It's flying Stakar's colors.

The ship hails to dock, and Yondu comes down to meet the pilot himself, with no idea who he's gonna see or what's going on here. He doesn't recognize the woman who comes striding down the gangplank in a swirling flare of blue Ravager leather until she puts her hands on her hips and looks up at him.

"Shit," he says slowly. "Quill."

"Yondu Udonta," she says, drawling it out. "I've been waiting a long time to do this." And then she hauls back and slaps him as hard as she can.

An instant later, a half-dozen guns are point at her. Yondu's arrow is humming in its holster, but he just squints at her as he holds up a hand, taking in the scars along her hairline, the blue coat, and the flame displayed proudly on her chest.

"Put those damn fool things away, boys. This gal's a Ravager." He takes another long look at her. "You're Stakar's?"

"I am," she says. "Now. He's going to want to talk to you, a bit later. But I've got a few things to say first. You have any drinks around here?"

So, as it turns out, he had _no idea_ how pissed Meredith Quill was going to be about getting abducted from her planet and dropped on an alien world by a man who admitted he'd been selling her son's half-siblings to a murderer.

After having surgery on Xandar, she set out to find Yondu out of some combination of a desire for revenge and to thank him for saving her life. (He's pretty sure even _she_ isn't really sure which one drove her harder.) Having no idea where to look, she could only try to track down the Ravagers (to Yondu's disbelief; no one _goes looking_ for Ravagers if they can help it). 

In the end, she found them, all right. She just didn't find the right ones.

And one thing led to another, and now apparently she's flying her own M-ship, and her kid's back on Stakar's ship, learning to steal shit or whatever the hell.

"We're putting together a Ravager army," she tells Yondu. "We're gonna go fight a planet. Are you in?"

Damn right, he's in.

* * *

4.

 

Somewhere there's a universe where Peter retains a glimmer of Celestial power as Ego's planet disintegrates beneath him, just a tiny spark ...

... but enough.

He tumbles through the airlock into the Quadrant's hold, ice crackling on Yondu's coat as Peter grips it in both fists, and he's fighting, fighting as hard as he can to hold onto consciousness, because Yondu's still moving weakly, there's still a faint glimmer of life in those ice-glazed eyes. Peter doesn't even know what he's doing or how he's doing it; all he knows is that he's been fighting as hard as he can during that seemingly endless time they were trapped in the cold blackness of space (really more like five minutes), until he can't even draw breath himself, and he's not going to let Yondu die, he's _not,_ even if it kills him --

"Peter." There are hands on him, Gamora's hands, shockingly warm against his cold skin. The space suit let go automatically as soon as it sensed oxygen around him, the disc dropping to the floor. She's trying to pry his fingers off Yondu's coat, as ice crystals on the leather melt against his skin. "Peter, Yondu's alive, he's alive, do you hear me? You have to let go."

Her words sink in, slowly, through the panic and the single-minded purpose, and when he lets go, he lets go all the way. He hears someone (not Gamora, maybe Kraglin) say his name in alarm as he spirals down into darkness.

 

***

 

Yondu wakes up hurting. His throat hurts, his lungs hurt, his whole damn body hurts. His _eyeballs_ hurt. But he's alive to feel it, which is more than he was expecting.

He's alive.

There was one spacesuit. 

Which means --

"Quill!" he barks hoarsely, eyes snapping open, and tries to sit up. All he ends up doing is thrashing in a tangle of blankets and wires, until a pair of very strong hands firmly push him back down. "Peter --"

"Stop that," Gamora's voice says firmly as her face swims into blurry view above him. "He's right next to you. See?"

Yondu turns his head to the side, and yep, as promised, there's Peter, sprawled on the side of the bed with a fur pulled half over him. Yondu is able to draw a painful breath at last.

"I would say don't wake him up," Gamora adds quietly, "but I'm not sure if anything can. We think he's all right, though. He hasn't quite come fully awake yet, but he's been in and out, and the one thing he's adamant about is not being moved anywhere you aren't."

She nods down at the bed between them. Yondu looks, and he's caught between humiliation and another, oddly warmer feeling at the discovery that the heavy, leaden feeling in his right arm -- the way it didn't want to move with the rest of him -- is due to Peter's fingers being clamped firmly on his wrist.

Yondu stares for another moment at the heap of red leather and gingery curls on the bed next to him (sometimes, from certain angles, Peter doesn't look that different than he did when he was fifteen) and then turns back to Gamora. "What happened?" he whispers. "How'm I alive?"

"I don't know. I couldn't have survived out there as long as you did, not without a suit, and I have body mods for that. I don't suppose Centaurians are known for their ability to survive in deep space?"

"Not that I know of."

"Maybe a final miracle, then," she said. "Courtesy of Ego."

"Like I'd take anything from _that_ jackass," Yondu mutters, making Gamora smile.

"By way of Peter, of course." With more brisk efficiency than gentleness, she pulls up the disarrayed blankets over Yondu and replaces an oxygen mask over his mouth that'd slipped down when he tried to sit up. It's bizarre to see the feared Daughter of Thanos playing nursemaid. He figures it's not the worst thing he's ever seen, though. 

"And I think we all know what happens," she adds, "when you try to come between Peter and someone he loves."

Yondu's heart lurches. "Let's not be throwin' around the 'L' word. When did you turn into such a sap, girl?"

"Oh," she murmurs, with a glance at Peter, "it's only some unspoken thing, I guess." Drawing herself together, she stands up. "Kraglin and Rocket are on the flight deck. I'll go tell them you're awake."

He winces at the idea of having well-intentioned sympathy descend on him. Well, in Rocket's case, more likely a barrage of friendly and not-so-friendly insults, but still. Green Gal's completely unwarranted use of the "L" word is still ringing in his ears. "Tell 'em I _was_ awake and now I'm sleepin'."

A brief smile flickers across her lips, and she moves a cup of water beside the bed, in easy reach. "You saved Peter's life. It's the least I can do. Someone will be down in a bit with something to eat, if you feel up for it."

Her hand brushes lightly across Peter's curls before she leaves. 

In the blessed silence, Yondu glances over at Peter, sleeping in an oversized heap of sprawling limbs on the bed. He also notices what he didn't notice before: a little twist of branches curled up against Peter's shoulder. Twig's here too.

The saving goes both ways here, he's pretty sure. Doesn't want to think about where he'd be, _what_ he'd be, if he'd gone ahead and taken Peter to Ego's planet all those years ago.

Well. Dead's where he'd be, along with every other sucker in the galaxy, apparently. Dead's where he _should_ be.

But he's glad right down to the bottom of his soul that Peter's not.

He didn't expect to be alive at the end of all this. Didn't expect to have to cope with the consequences of what he said to Peter, there at the end; didn't expect he'd still have to deal with things he's not thinking about, like the loss of three-quarters of his ship and all but one of his crew. Right now he feels like something in him has been torn open, something that'd long ago scarred shut, and now it's open and it _hurts_ and he doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't know how to handle feeling all of these things.

But something about Peter's presence beside him salves it a little. As long as he doesn't think too much, takes each day at a time, maybe he can deal with this.

Death would've been easier, but maybe death isn't the better option.

There's a sudden tug at his wrist. Peter jerks, his whole body twitching, eyelids fluttering. Dream. Not a good one, from the way his face twists. He makes a faint noise in his throat, like something in pain. Curled up in the hollow between his ear and shoulder, Groot stirs with a sleepy, disgrunted "I am Groot!"

"Hey," Yondu murmurs. He moves his arm, tugging at Peter's hand, which is well and truly clamped on his wrist; the fingers spasm with a strength that's almost painful. Finally he reaches over and puts his other hand over Peter's, and gives it a light smack. "Hey, boy. Knock it off."

Peter's eyes flutter dazedly open, still full to the brim with sleep, not really tracking at all. He stares at Yondu with a baffled blankness, and there's something deep and lost in his gaze, as if he's been staring into another universe where they didn't both make it back after all.

"Go to sleep," Yondu tells him, muffled by the oxygen mask. His hand settles on Peter's almost without his conscious control; he gives it a quick squeeze.

"Mmm ... okay," Peter agrees sleepily, eyes drifting shut again. 

With another annoyed mutter of "I am _Groot!"_ Groot untangles himself from Peter's hair and shuffles across to climb sleepily up Yondu's arm and flops down on his chest, where he apparently goes back to sleep again.

Yondu lets go of Peter's hand with a light pat and curls his hand over the twig's little body. His reputation as a badass space pirate is probably a lost cause anyway.

Peter's fingers twitch against his wrist.

He's not sure how he's going to handle being alive. This wasn't something he planned for.

But.

Alive is an all right thing to be.


End file.
